Thank you for understanding the spirit of my comment. I will take this flag as a very good lesson in risk management: no matter how many times you are positive in the exchange, the one time that you strike out can be fatal.
Yes, and the effect is worse because there's a massive disconnect between how we perceive our own intent and how it comes across to readers on the internet--or at least to some segment of readers, but when the community is large enough, every segment is an entire audience.
I can see your point. But if we are going meta... the discussion was going for quite some time exclusively between me and hef and though it got "heated" at one point, I didn't get the feeling that it was derailing at just some senseless uncivil exchange of insults. It is the kind of thing that can happen between a group of people talking at the bar, not just the internet.
Also, precisely due to this disconnect between what we write and how it can be perceived, it does seem helpful to me to occasionally have some curved ball thrown into the mix to help calibrate my sense of (a) where the other party is coming from and (b) check if the other party is willing to listen to you or just participate in a screaming match.
